Now, I’m a wretched sinner with a gas tank full of Catholic pride and guilt. I’m a believer in the Holy Trinity largely because I was born into a Catholic family and told to be one early in life or do not pass Go and go straight to hell.

If someone had a gun to my head, I would probably confess that I might be willing to die for my beliefs, but I’m deep down more spiritual in nature than religious.

Translation: I believe there is something greater than us that created us, and that belief will never be proved or refuted. It will always be a mystery.

RELIGIOUS STRIFE IS UP

Now comes a recent study from a reputable think tank that analyzed how our disparate beliefs are essentially continuing to drive most conflicts throughout the world.

According to the study, released last week by the Pew Research Center, the share of countries with a high or very high level of social hostilities involving religion reached a six-year peak in 2012.

Roughly a third of the 198 countries and territories included in the study had “high religious hostilities in 2012, up from 29 percent in 2011 and 20 percent as of mid-2007.”

Religious hostilities increased in every major region of the world except the Americas, the study found. The sharpest increase, the study noted, was in the Middle East and North Africa. There was a significant increase in religious hostilities in the Asia-Pacific region, where China edged into the “high” category for the first time.

JEWS, MUSLIMS, CHRISTIANS HARASSED

Other highlights from the report:

— Restrictions on religion are high or very high in 43 percent of countries, also a six-year high. Because some of these countries (like China) are very populous, more than 5.3 billion people (76 percent of the world’s population) live in countries with a high or very high level of restrictions on religion, up from 74 percent in 2011 and 68 percent as of mid-2007.

— Among the world’s 25 most populous countries, Egypt, Indonesia, Russia, Pakistan and Burma (Myanmar) had the most restrictions on religion in 2012, when both government restrictions and social hostilities are taken into account.

— Two of the seven major religious groups monitored by the study — Muslims and Jews — experienced six-year highs in the number of countries in which they were harassed by national, provincial or local governments or by individuals or groups in society. As in previous years, Christians and Muslims — who together make up more than half the global population — were harassed in the largest number of countries (110 and 109, respectively).

JUDGE NOT. EASIER SAID …

Europe, according to the study, had the biggest increase in the median level of government restrictions in 2012, followed closely by the Middle East-North Africa.

The driving force for the spike is mounting tensions involving a recent influx of mostly Muslim immigrants to the region, said Brian Grim, a PRC senior researcher who kicked off the study six years ago to analyze global religious intolerance fueled by government restrictions and religion-based social hostilities.

A law passed in France barring women from wearing burqas is just one example, Grim explained. Other recent laws in Europe restrict free speech in certain cases.

“In the U.S. we have freedom of speech as long as they are not ‘fighting words,’ ” Grim said. “In Europe, the laws have become more restrictive in relation to hate speech and religion.”

Grim, who lectured on the report Thursday before the United Nations, said a panel of religious leaders who followed him noted the stark difference between government restrictions or religious intolerance in the Americas and the hot spots in other locales.

Perhaps the biggest issue in the U.S. in recent years has been the pushback over a government mandate for some religious-affiliated employers and other entities to provide health coverage for contraceptives.

The controversy spawned “religious liberty” protests and demonstrations by the Roman Catholic Church and supporters across the nation.

“You cannot minimize any issue,” Grim said. “But the panel did note the stark difference in scale between that, and, say,what’s going on in Pakistan,” Grim said, referring to attacks and bombings of Christian churches and individuals.

Religious intolerance, because we still believe our beliefs are absolutely right and everyone else’s is wrong, continues to be a dark stain on mankind. Perhaps the central foundation for reaching a universal common ground to build on is an acceptance of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

It would excuse me somewhat from the two major and most challenging of Catholic mandates — to love your enemies and to accept the notion that we are not of this world.

But what is life without such heady burdens? As the good book says, judge not, that ye be not judged.

ONLINE

From smoking crack in a Harlem drug den for a front-page exposé to covering the deaths of 86 people in a Bronx social club fire, Rubén Rosario spent 11 years as a writer for the New York Daily News before joining the Pioneer Press in 1991 as special correspondent and city editor. He launched his award-winning column in 1997. He is by far the loudest writer in the newsroom over the phone.

As you comment, please be respectful of other commenters and other viewpoints. Our goal with article comments is to provide a space for civil, informative and constructive conversations. We reserve the right to remove any comment we deem to be defamatory, rude, insulting to others, hateful, off-topic or reckless to the community. See our full terms of use here.

More in Opinion

THE SHOWBOAT’S FUTURE Wanted: a management partner who will “creatively explore new programming and service opportunities” at a unique St. Paul riverfront facility. It’s the former Minnesota Centennial Showboat at Harriet Island Regional Park, and the city’s Parks and Recreation Department says its call for ideas is the “opportunity to re-imagine what this riverboat could be.” The department is seeking...

TEACHING USEFUL SKILLS Schools, are you listening? Joe Soucheray’s Dec. 1 column was brilliant. (“What’s next? Fancy signs in lunchrooms telling kids to chew?) Taking students with disciplinary problems and giving them a useful way to be productive, even teaching them a skill they could possibly use for future employment, is exactly what our schools should be doing. Snow and...

TRUMP’S NEXT CHAPTER Atticus Finch, the beloved father and lawyer in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is one of literature’s most admirable characters, defending a black man accused of raping a white woman in a bigoted Southern town. But what has come to be considered Lee’s original manuscript, “Go Set a Watchman,” which was published in 2015 after lying...

Though the presidential campaign did not focus much attention on it, the federal debt confronting President-elect Donald Trump is greater, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time since Harry Truman’s World War II term of office. Trump more than Democrat Hillary Clinton did give lip service but few specifics about the size of the growing national debt...

The best way to solve the conundrum of 11 million undocumented immigrants who are living, working and contributing to America right now has a name: “245(i).” Section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act is a law that enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress in its 13 years of existence. It is still on the books, though it expired in 2001...

St. Paul’s Right of Way (ROW) assessment program has certainly had a rough few months. First, nonprofits succeeded in getting the Minnesota Supreme Court to declare the assessment a tax subject to constitutional restrictions on taxing nonprofits. In a rare moment of ideological Kumbaya, conservative and progressive policy organizations joined hands to argue against it at the Supreme Court, as...